120 billion spam emails. Taste that number. That is how many waste-of-space, soul-sucking, worthless emails pollute the internet
every
single
day.
We sampled the not-inconsiderable amount of spam our office mail server gets hammered with every day to estimate the average size of a spam email, which happens to be 4.27 kilobytes (based on a sample of just over a thousand spam emails).
That lands us on a daily overall bandwidth usage of 120 billion * 4.27 kilobytes = 512 terabytes of nothing but SPAM.
Sure, the main bandwidth hog these days is probably streaming video, but spam is completely unnecessary material that doesn’t add anything good whatsoever:
- Added strain on the internet’s infrastructure.
- Wasted bandwidth.
- Wasted disk space on mail servers AND workstations.
- AND finally, how many legitimate emails aren’t missed because they disappear in the masses of spam?
This is just wishful thinking, but SPAM, PLEASE GO AWAY!
(Image courtesy of freezelight.)